The Story of Civilization: Volume VII: The Age of Reason Begins Page 10

  Is it not both great vanity and uncleanness that at the table, a place of respect, of cleanliness, of modesty, men should not be ashamed to sit tossing of Tobacco pipes, and puffing the smoke one to another, making the filthy smoke and stink thereof to exhale athwart the dishes and infect the air? … The public use whereof, at all times and in all places, hath now so far prevailed as divers men … have been at least forced to take it also, without desire … ashamed to seem singular … Moreover, which is a great iniquity … the husband shall not be ashamed to reduce thereby his delicate, wholesome, and clean complexioned wife to that extremity, that either she must also corrupt her sweet breath therewith, or else resolute to live in a perpetual stinking torment … A custom loathesome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and, in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.50

  Despite this and heavy taxes, there were seven thousand tobacco shops in London. Lighting and puffing did not take the place of conversation. Both sexes spoke freely of matters now confined to smoking rooms, street corners, and scientists; and women vied with men in oaths that verged on blasphemy. In the Elizabethan drama whores rub elbows with heroes, and doubles-entendres sprinkle high tragedy. Manners were ceremonious rather than polite; words often graduated into blows. Manners, like morals, came from Italy and France, and also manuals of courtesy that strove to make gentlemen of aristocrats and ladies of queens. Modes of salutation were effusive, often osculatory. Homes were more cheerful with light and jollity than before under medieval terror or afterward under Puritan gloom. Festivals were frequent; any excuse served for a procession or parade; weddings, lyings-in, even funerals, gave occasion for festivities, at least for meals. Games of all sorts were played in homes and fields and on the Thames. Shakespeare mentions billiards, and Florio speaks of cricket. Blue laws and blue Sundays were laughed at; if the Queen set the merry pace, why should not her people keep step with her? Nearly everybody danced, including, said Burton, “old men and women that have more toes than teeth.” And all England sang.

  VI. ENGLISH MUSIC: 1558–1649

  No one who knows only post-Puritan England can feel the joyous role of music in Elizabethan days. From the home, the school, the church, the street, the stage, the Thames, rose sacred or profane song—masses, motets, madrigals, ballads, and delicate little lyrics of love such as those that found a setting in Elizabethan plays. Music was a main course in education; at Westminster School it received two hours a week; Oxford had a chair of music (1627). Every gentleman was expected to read music and play some instrument. In Thomas Morley’s Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597) an imaginary untutored Englishman confesses this shame:

  Supper being ended, and musicke bookes, according to the custome, being brought to the table, the mistresse of the house presented me with a part, earnestly requesting me to sing; but when, after many excuses, I protested unfeignedly that I could not, everyone began to wonder, some whispering to others, demanding how I was brought up.51

  Barbershops provided instruments for waiting customers to play.

  Elizabethan music was predominantly secular. Some composers, like Tallis, Byrd, and Bull, remained Catholic despite the laws and wrote for the Roman ritual, but such compositions were not publicly performed. Many Puritans objected to church music as diverting piety; Elizabeth and the bishops saved church music in England, as Palestrina and the Council of Trent rescued it in Italy. The Queen supported with her wonted determination the chapelmasters who organized large choirs and formal music for the royal chapel and the cathedrals. The Book of Common Prayer became a magnificent libretto for English composers, and the Anglican services almost rivaled the Continental Catholic in polyphonic splendor and dignity. Even the Puritans, following Calvin’s lead, approved psalm singing by the congregations; Elizabeth laughed at these “Geneva jigs,” but they matured into some noble hymns.

  Since the Queen was a profanely secular spirit and loved to be courted, it was fitting that the musical glory of her reign should be the madrigal—love in counterpoint, a part song unaccompanied by instruments. Italian madrigals reached England in 1553 and set the key. Morley tried his hand at the form, expounded it in his graceful dialogue, and invited imitation. A madrigal for five voices, by John Wilbye, suggests the themes of these “ayres”:

  Alas, what a wretched life this is, what a death,

  Where the tyrant love commandeth!

  My flowering days are in their prime declining,

  All my proud hope quite fallen, and life entwining;

  My joys each after other in haste are flying

  And leave me dying

  For her that scorns my crying;

  Oh, she from here departs, my Love restraining,

  For whom, all heartless, alas, I die complaining.52

  William Byrd was the Shakespeare of Elizabethan music, famous for masses and madrigals, for vocal and instrumental compositions alike. His contemporaries honored him as homo memorabilis; Morley said he was “never without reverence to be named among the musicians.”53 Almost as highly rated and versatile were Orlando Gibbons and John Bull, royalchapel organists. These and Byrd joined (1611) in producing the initial book of keyboard music in England, Parthenia, or The Maydenhead of the first musicke that ever was printed for the Virginalls. Meanwhile the English sustained their reputation for composing solo songs of a wholesome freshness redolent of the English countryside. John Dowland, renowned as a virtuoso of the lute, won praise for his Songes or Ayres, and Thomas Campion gave him close rivalry. Who does not know Campion’s “Cherry Ripe”?54

  Musicians were organized in a strong union, disturbed under Charles I by internal strife.55 Instruments were nearly as various as today: lute, harp, organ, virginal or spinet, clavichord or harpsichord, flute, recorder (our flageolet), hautboy, cornet, trombone, trumpet, drums, and many forms of viol, which was now giving place to the violin. The lute was favored for virtuoso performance and to accompany songs; the virginal, modest mother of the piano, was popular with young women, at least before marriage. Instrumental music was intended chiefly for the virginal, the viol, and the lute. A kind of chamber music was composed for an ensemble or “consort” of viols varying in size and range. Campion, in a masque for James I’s Queen Anne, used an orchestra of lutes, harpsichords, cornets, and nine viols (1605). Much instrumental music by Byrd, Morley, Dowland, and others has come down to us. It is largely based on dance forms, follows Italian models, and excels in a delicate and tender beauty rather than in vigor or range. Fugue and counterpoint are developed, but no thematic variation, no ingenuity in modulation, no resolved discords or chromatic harmonies. And yet when our nerves are frayed with the pounding stimuli of modern life, we find something cleansing and healing in Elizabethan music; no bombast, no rasping dissonances, no thundering finales, only the voice of an English youth or girl singing plaintively or merrily the timeless canticles of impeded love.

  VII. ENGLISH ART: 1558–1649

  The Elizabethan was a minor age in art. Metalworkers turned out some lovely silverware, like the Mostyn salt cellar, and majestic grilles like that in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor. The making of Venetian glass was domiciled in England about 1560; vessels of such glass were by many valued above corresponding pieces in silver or gold. Sculpture and pottery were undistinguished. Nicholas Hilliard developed a school of miniature painting, and Elizabeth granted him a monopoly in so reproducing her features. Portrait painters were importees: Federigo Zuccaro from Italy, Marcus Gheeraerts and his son of the same name from the Netherlands. The son has left us an imposing portrait of William Cecil in resplendent, voluminous robes as a Knight of the Garter.56 Otherwise there was no great painting in England between Holbein and Vandyck.

  Only architecture was a major art in the England of Elizabeth and James, and it was almost entirely secular. While Europe was fighting the battle of the faiths, art, like conduct, neglected religion.
In medieval centuries, when the profoundest poetry and art had their roots in the sky, architecture dedicated itself to church building, and made homes a form of life imprisonment. In Tudor England religion departed from life into politics; the wealth of the Church passed into lay hands and was transformed into civic structures and lordly palaces. Style changed accordingly. In 1563 John Shute returned from Italy and France bursting with Vitruvius, Palladio, and Serlio; soon he published The First and Chief Grounds of Architecture, lauding the classic styles; so the Italian scorn of Gothic entered England, and Gothic verticals fought for air amid the encompassing horizontals of the Renaissance.

  In civic architecture the age could boast some handsome achievements: the gate of honor of Caius College and the quadrangle of Clare College at Cambridge, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the Royal Exchange in London, and the Middle Temple. As lawyers, since Wolsey, had replaced bishops in the administration of England, it was fitting that the civic masterpiece of Elizabethan Renaissance architecture should be the great hall of a law school, finished in the Middle Temple in 1572. No woodwork in England was finer than the oak screen at the inner end of that hall. It was demolished by bombs in the Second World War.

  When Elizabethan magnates could afford it they built palaces rivaling the châteaux of the Loire. Sir John Thynne raised Longleat House; Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury, had her Hardwick Hall; Thomas, Earl of Suffolk, built Audley End at a cost of £190,000, “mainly procured from Spanish bribes”;57 Sir Edward Phillips reared Montacute House in chaste Renaissance style; and Sir Francis Willoughby erected Wollaton Hall. William Cecil poured part of his gleanings into an immense château near Stamford; and his son Robert spent almost as much on Hatfield House, whose long gallery is one of the grandest interiors in all the architecture of the age. Such long galleries, on an upper floor, replaced in Elizabethan palaces the timbered great hall of the manor house. Magnificent chimney pieces, massive furniture in walnut or oak, majestic stairways, carved balustrades, and timbered ceilings gave these palatial chambers a warmth and dignity missing in the more brilliant rooms of the French châteaux. So far as we know, the designers of these palaces were the first to receive the title of architect. The epitaph of Robert Smythson, creator of Wollaton Hall, called him “architector,” i.e., master builder; now at last the great profession found its modern name.

  Now, too, English art became personal, and a man stamped his work with his character and his will. Born in Smithfield in 1573, Inigo Jones showed in youth such a flair for design that an earl sent him to Italy (1600) to study Renaissance architecture. Back in England (1605), he prepared the scenery of many masques for James I and his Danish Queen. He visited Italy again (1612–14) and returned an enthusiast for the classic architectural principles that he had studied in the English translation (1567?) of Vitruvius, and which he found illustrated in the buildings of Palladio, Peruzzi, Sanmicheli, and Sansovino in Venice and Vicenza. He rejected the anomalous mixtures of German, Flemish, French, and Italian forms that had predominated in Elizabethan architecture; he proposed a pure classic style, in which the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders would be kept apart or combined in a congenial sequence and unity.

  In 1615 he was put in charge of all royal construction as surveyor general of the works. When the banqueting hall in the palace of Whitehall was burned down (1619), Jones was commissioned to build a new hall for the King. He planned an immense congeries of structures—all in all, 1,152 feet by 874—which, if completed, would have given the British ruler a vaster home than the Louvre, the Tuileries, the Escorial, or Versailles. But James preferred drinking for the day to building for centuries; he confined his outlay to the new banqueting hall, which, deprived of its intended setting, presented an unprepossessing façade of classical and Renaissance lines. When Archbishop Laud asked James to repair the old Cathedral of St. Paul the architect committed the crime of encasing the Gothic nave in a Renaissance exterior. Fortunately this structure was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666. Jones’s Palladian fronts gradually replaced the Tudor style, and it dominated England till the middle of the eighteenth century.

  Jones not only served as chief architect for Charles I, but learned to love that luckless gentleman so visibly that when the Civil War broke out he buried his savings in the Lambeth marshes and fled to Hampshire (1643). Cromwell’s soldiers captured him there, but gave him his life for £1,045.58 During this absence from London he designed a country house in Wiltshire for the Earl of Pembroke. The façade was simple Renaissance, but the interior was a model of grandeur and elegance; the “double-cube” hall, sixty by thirty by thirty feet, has been judged the most beautiful room in England.59 As royal armies consumed aristocratic wealth, Jones lost patronage as well as popularity; he retired into obscurity and died in poverty (1651). Art slept while war remade the government of England.

  VIII. ELIZABETHAN MAN

  How can we understand the Elizabethan Englishman from the supposedly staid and silent Briton of our youth? Can it be that national character is a function of place and time and change? Puritanism and Methodism intervened between the two ages and types; centuries of Eton, Harrow, and Rugby; and reckless conquerors quiet down when they sit supreme.

  All in all, the Elizabethan Englishman was a scion of the Renaissance. In Germany the Reformation overwhelmed the Renaissance; in France the Renaissance rejected the Reformation; in England the two movements merged. Under Elizabeth the Reformation triumphed; in Elizabeth, the Renaissance. There were some stolid—not speechless—Puritans there, but they did not set the key. The dominant man of the age was a charge of energy released from old dogmas and inhibitions and not yet bound to new; boundless in ambition, longing to develop his capacities, unshackled in humor, sensitive to literature if it breathed life, given to violence of action and speech, but struggling, amid his bombast, vices, and cruelties, to be a gentleman. His ideal hovered between the amiable courtesies of Castiglione’s Courtier and the ruthless immoralism of Machiavelli’s Prince. He admired Sidney, but he aspired to be Drake.

  Meanwhile philosophy made its way through the cracks of crumbling faith, and the best minds of the age were the most disturbed. There were orthodox and conservative souls, timid and gentle souls, amid this undammed flux; there were good men like Roger Ascham, desperately preaching the virtues that had served the past. But their students were in a venturesome mood. Hear Gabriel Harvey on Cambridge:

  The Gospel taught, not learned; Christian Key cold; nothing good but by imputation; the ceremonial law, in word abrogated; the judicial in effect disannulled; the moral indeed abandoned … All inquisitive after news, new books, new fashions, new laws … some after new heavens, and hells too … Every day fresh span new opinions: heresy in divinity, in philosophy, in humanity, in manners … The Devil not so hated as the pope.60

  Copernicus had upset the world and sent the earth whirling dizzily through space. Giordano Bruno came to Oxford in 1583 and talked of the new astronomy and infinite worlds, the sun dying of its own heat, the planets decaying into atomic mist. Poets like John Donne felt the earth slipping beneath their feet.

  In 1595 Florio began to publish his translation of Montaigne; after that nothing was certain, and doubt was the air men breathed; as Marlowe is Machiavelli, so Shakespeare is Montaigne. While wise men doubted, young men schemed. If heaven seemed lost in a philosophic cloud, youth could resolve to suck this life dry and sample all truth however lethal, all beauty however fleeting, all power however poisonous. So Marlowe conceived his Faust and Tamburlaine.

  It was this plowing up of old ideas, this liberation of the mind for the impassioned utterance of new hopes and dreams, that made Elizabethan England memorable. What would we have cared for its political rivalries, its religious disputes, its martial triumphs, its thirst for gold, if its literature, confined to these passing things, had not voiced the longings, hesitations, and resolves of thoughtful souls in every age? All the influences of that exciting time came to the Elizabethan ecstasy: the voyages of
conquest and discovery that expanded the globe, the market, and the mind; the wealth of the middle classes enlarging the scope and goals of enterprise; the revelation of pagan literature and art; the upheaval of the Reformation; the rejection of papal influence in England; the theological debates that unwittingly led men from dogma to reason; education and the widening audience for books and plays; the long and profitable peace, and then the arousing challenge and exhilarating victory over Spain; the great crescendo of confidence in human power and thought: all these were the stimuli that prodded England into greatness, these the germs that made her big with Shakespeare. Now, after almost two silent centuries since Chaucer, she burst into a passion of prose and poetry, drama and philosophy, and spoke out bravely to the world.

  * * *

  I. In Shakespeare’s time prat was already popular for “buttocks,” and duds for “clothes.”

  II. Aubrey tells a tale that gives point to Ascham: “Sir Walter Raleigh, being invited to dinner with some great person … His son sat next to his father, and was very demure at least half dinner time. Then said he: ‘I, this morning, not having the fear of God before my eyes … went to a whore. I was very eager of her … and went to enjoy her, but she thrust me from her and vowed I should not, “For your father lay with me but an hour ago.” ‘ Sir Walt, being so strangely surprised … at so great a table, gives his son a damned blow over the face; his son, as rude as he was, would not strike his father, but strikes over the face of the gentleman that sat next to him, and said, ‘Box about, ‘twill come to my father anon.’ “—Brief Lives, 256.